Every time we put anything about Trudeau on our web pages or Twitter feeds, our readership numbers go through the roof.

The media coverage of Justin Trudeau’s campaign for the Liberal leadership is the closest thing we have to a parade right now in Canadian politics.

By:Susan DelacourtOttawa bureau, Published on Sat Oct 06 2012

OTTAWA — Journalistically speaking, it isn’t much fun to cover a parade.

Parades are noisy and crowded and when you come right down to it, nothing really happens. It’s just a lot of people putting one foot in front of the other and some floats passing by.

I note this only to open the conversation about the media coverage of Justin Trudeau’s campaign for the Liberal leadership — the closest thing we have to a parade right now in Canadian politics.

People who aren’t crazy about Trudeau — yes, there are some — are accusing journalists of inventing this buzz around the 40-year-old son of the former prime minister. “A media-fabricated sensation,” one commenter suggested this week, reacting to yet another column on Trudeau’s mass appeal.

I won’t speak for other political reporters but if I was inventing a story that was fun to cover, it wouldn’t be a parade. I tend to like constitutional conferences and the ongoing Scottish independence story, but that’s just me.

Many of us who made the trek to that out-of-the-way, crowded auditorium in Montreal on Tuesday night were there to watch Trudeau launch his campaign for one main reason: readers demanded it. Every time we put anything about Trudeau on our web pages or Twitter feeds, our readership numbers go through the roof. Can we explain this? Not really.

In my nearly 30 years in the print-journalism business, it’s only very recently that we’ve been able to accurately track what people want to read. That innovation came to us, of course, through the magic of the web.

Everything in print journalism got a lot faster when the Internet came along — the news cycle, deadlines, readers’ reactions. Where once you had to type a letter to the editor and put it in the mail, now you need only click on a web page to register your approval or outrage.

All those clicks gave us something else we didn’t have before the Internet — instant ratings.

Readership used to be measured by periodic, old-fashioned surveys of circulation. The more sophisticated ones would look at individual stories or columns but, by and large, we only learned generally and infrequently what people were actually reading.

Web clicks changed all that. Now we learn, minute by minute, what is attracting readers. To my immense disappointment, it seems readers prefer parades to constitutional conferences.

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are also measuring tools. They track “friends” and “followers” in the big picture, but they also can tell us which posts generate the most interest.

There’s a little gadget on Twitter, for instance, called bitly. It shortens weblinks to fit more tidily in the 140-character limits, which is handy. Even handier, though, is the “stats page.” It shows you which of those shortened links is getting the most web traffic, and where the clicks are coming from.

I guess I don’t need to tell you that on my stats page this week, the links I posted about Trudeau were generating hundreds and hundreds of clicks, while non-Trudeau links attracted a few dozen here and there.

Journalism, ideally, should be a balance of giving people what they want and what they need.

We now have the tools to measure what readers want, but we still have to rely on old-fashioned things like news judgment, education and experience to assess what people need to be informed citizens. That’s still more art than science, in other words.

And all those columns musing on Trudeau’s chances in the Liberal leadership race, when you think about it, are reflections on the same theme.

Sure, everyone wants Trudeau to run, but is he what Liberals need? Is popularity the same thing as leadership?

Those are the hard questions that political journalists prefer to cover, as far as I can tell. Given the choice between making readers think and making readers happy (or angry), I bet most of us would choose the former.

It’s difficult to tell right now whether all this interest in Trudeau’s Liberal leadership campaign will remain as intense over the six long months leading to the end of the race on April 14. Trudeau himself, in a casual chat a while back, predicted that people would be bored with the whole race by Christmas.

If the interest does endure, however, it will be largely a result of all those continued clicks and instant ratings. The Trudeau “sensation,” such as it is, boils down to a case of supply and demand.

As long as you, the readers, keep creating that demand, we in the media will continue to supply the coverage you keep telling us you want. Do feel free to tell us what you need, too, though.

Susan Delacourt is a member of the Star’s Ottawa bureau.

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